On Sun, Jan 09, 2005 at 02:55:28PM -0800, steve harris wrote:
While one important issue is the post-proofing bottleneck in DP (which is being given attention), as important but more fundamental is whether
Can you give details about this bottleneck issue?
the PG project/organization/effort is positioned for growth.
It also raises a difficult issue: If we are going to do a significant chunk of the public domain in a reasonably short period, it probably doesn't matter in what order we do the books.
You are touching here the problem of the (lack of) editorial policy of PG / PGDP. I tried to "centralize" the list of French books being worked on (or finished) on PG, both PGDP, and ebooksgratuits.com: http://www.eleves.ens.fr/home/blondeel/PGDP/catalog/ A friend of mine studying literature "promised" to give me "the list of all French books ever, sorted by descending importance" when she could ask her professor --- or anything "close" to that, because of course this list is impossible to make (even without an "importante" rating). For Halloween, some French-language PGDP PMs just grep'ed the string "fantome" (French for "ghost") in Gallica[*] (a big public website with many scans of books, and those guys agreed for PGDP to use their images). [*] http://gallica.bnf.fr/ The ebooksgratuits.com people sometimes work on all the books of a given author. All this makes for a not very coherent, consistent editorial policy. I guess literature people can easily criticize the PG French catalog (some very obscure books, and some blatant misses). Of course the obvious answer would be "stop whining and do it yourself then!" but those people just don't work this way (think "psychology"). They're not hackers, they don't have this culture of "let's get involved, roll up our sleeves and change the world", but still they could be useful to PG. When I proof pages in PGDP, I usually work on the oldest book sitting around. It's both a feeling of "duty" and it makes me discover things I wouldn't have without that. So the time I spend on obscure books is not spent on more "important" ones. On the other hand, it would be difficult to set up an official editorial board: of course it should not be too bureaucratic and complicated, of course it should not have a monopoly of the books proposed to PGDP (PMs would still be free to kick in books they just like, keeping in mind they will delay the more "important" books. We work in limited resources, so we should define priorities). But above all we are missing the competent people: I guess a bunch of University professors specialized in pre-XXth century literature, history, philosophy etc. would do, but how many of those know PG? (If you don't like scholars because they tend to be non pragmatic and argue about pointless details, replace that with: essay writers, journalists, whoever is important in the "culture" of the language considered). Has PG achieved any kind of fruitful collaboration with scholars? I could use my ink-jet printer and phone diary and send a mailing to random French literature professors I would find, but that would not look very credible to them (no matter how important and nice PG is anyway). References would help to make a bootstrap, then these people could relay the information between themselves and to their students (all master thesis dealing with old books could give PG their stuff, etc.; students could work on some books in the PGDP's, etc.). Plus having some "official title" (like "PG French editorial board") in something that looks important and more and more important with time ("PG") could maybe give them the incentive to help us a little.